went off with a bevy of boyars to a dinner which he had ordered at his Ambassador Lefort's. Salvos of artillery mingled with the shouts of the drinkers, and the pleasures of the table were protracted to a late hour of the evening. Then, taking advantage of the shades of night, attended by a very few of those in whom he reposes most confidence, he went to the Kremlin, where he indulged a father's affection in seeing his darling little son [the Tsarevich Alexis], kissed him thrice, and leaving many other pledges of endearment, returned to his wooden dwelling in Preobrazhenskoe, fleeing the sight of his wife, the Tsaritsa [Eudoxia], whom he dislikes with a loathing of old date.
A few days later, Peter celebrated the Russian New Year— which, according to the calendar of Old Muscovy, began September 1—with a huge banquet at General Shein's house. The guests included a large crowd of boyars, officers and others, among them a group of common sailors from the infant fleet. Peter particularly honored the sailors, spending much of the evening with them, halving apples and giving one part to a sailor while eating the other himself: He threw his arm around one sailor and called him 'brother.' Toast followed toast, and each lifting of the glasses provoked a salute of twenty-five guns.
*After Peter, beards returned very slowly to the upper levels of Russian society. Through the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, all public officials and officers and soldiers of the army were required to be shaved. In the 1860's and 1870's, under Alexander II, this rule was relaxed and many government ministers and Russian soldiers—with the exception of members of the Imperial Guard—again began to wear beards. All the tsars who followed Peter I were clean-shaven except the last two, Alexander III and Nicholas II, who both wore beards in order to manifest their strong Slavophile tastes.
Still another 'sumptuous entertainment' took place two weeks after the Tsar's return, and although Peter arrived with 'his gums swollen with toothache,' the Austrian ambassador reported that he had never seen him happier. General Patrick Gordon arrived to present himself to the Tsar for the first time since Peter's return, excusing himself for the delay by saying that he had been at his country house and had been held back by bad weather and storms. The old soldier twice bowed low and was about to go on his knees to embrace the Tsar around the knees when Peter extended his hand and clasped it warmly.
Not long after Peter compelled his boyars to shave their beards, he also began to insist they change from traditional Russian clothing to Western dress. Some had already done so; Polish costume had appeared at court and was regularly worn by progressive figures such as Vasily Golitsyn. In 1681, Tsar Fedor had insisted that his courtiers shorten their long robes so as to permit them to walk. But most continued to wear the traditional Russian national costume: embroidered shirt, wide breeches tucked into floppy boots brilliantly colored in red or green with turned- up toes and gold trim, and on top of that a caftan reaching to the ground with a straight collar of velvet, satin or brocade and sleeves of exaggerated length and width. To go outdoors, another long garment was added, light in summer, fur-lined in winter, with high, square collar and even longer sleeves which fell to the bottom of the heels. Walking in procession in Moscow in their long, flowing robes and tall, fur-lined hats, a group of Russian boyars made an opulent, almost Oriental picture.
Peter detested this national dress because it was impractical. In his own active life, working in a shipyard, sailing, marching with his soldiers, the long, bulky robes got in the way and he could scarcely walk. Nor did he like the expressions of curiosity, amusement and contempt which he saw on Western faces when a group of Russians in national costumes walked through the streets of a Western town. Back in Moscow, he resolved on change. Among the most persistent wearers of the old dress was the stem Prince Romodanovsky. When Romodanovsky was told that Fedor Golovin, an ambassador of the Great Embassy, had taken off his Russian clothes in the West and put on fashionable foreign garments, Romodanovsky said, 'I do not believe Golovin to be such a brainless ass as to despise the dress of his fatherland.' Yet on October 30, when Peter ordered that Golovin and Lefort be received in state to acknowledge the Embassy's return, and that only those in Western dress be allowed to appear, Romodanovsky himself was obliged to conform.
That winter, in the course of a two-day banquet and celebration to dedicate Lefprt's new palace, Peter took a pair of long cutting shears and clipped the wide sleeves of the boyars around him at the table. 'See,' he said, 'these things are in your way. You are safe nowhere with them. At one moment you upset a glass, then you forgetfully dip them in the sauce.' He handed the sheared-off sleeves to the astonished guests, suggesting, 'Get gaiters made of them.'
A year later, in January 1700, Peter transformed persuasion into decree. With rolling drums in the streets and squares, it was proclaimed that all boyars, government officials and men of property, both in Moscow and in the provinces, were to abandon their long robes and provide themselves with Hungarian or German-style caftans. The following year, a new decree commanded men to wear a waistcoat, breeches, gaiters, boots and a hat in the French or German-style, and women to put on petticoats, skirts, bonnets and Western shoes. Later decrees prohibited the wearing of high Russian boots and long Russian knives. Models of the new approved costumes were hung at Moscow's gates and in public places in the city for people to observe and copy. All who arrived at the gates in traditional dress except peasants were permitted to enter only after paying a fine. Subsequently, Peter instructed the guards at the city gates to force to their knees all visitors arriving in long, traditional coats and then to cut off the coats at the point where the lowered garment touched the ground. 'Many hundreds of coats were cut accordingly,' says Perry, 'and being done with good humor it occasioned mirth among the people and soon broke the custom of wearing long coats, especially in places near Moscow and those towns wherever the Tsar came.'
Not surprisingly, Peter's sartorial transformation was much more readily accepted by women than by men. His sister Natalya and his widowed sister-in-law, Praskovaya, were the first to set the example, and many Russian noblewomen hurried to follow. Seeing great possibilities in foreign dress, anxious to be a la mode, they sent to the West for examples of the gowns, shoes and hats being worn at Versailles.
As time passed, subsequent decrees further extended and refined Peter's will that the new clothes be worn 'for the glory and comeliness of the state and the military profession.' Resistance was never so strong as that which had greeted his condemnation of beards; priests might still berate clean-shaven men, but the church did not rise to the defense of the traditional robes. Fashion has its own authority, and lesser men scurried to adopt the dress of their superiors. Within five years. Whitworth, the English ambassador, reported from Moscow that 'in all this great city not a single person of importance is to be met dressed otherwise than in the German manner.'
In the country, however, fashion still bowed to age-old habit. Those of the nobility, the bureaucracy and the merchants who fell under Peter's eye dressed as he desired, but other gentry living on their far-off estates still serenely wore their long robes. In a way, this first and most obvious of Peter's reforms on his return from the West was typical of what followed. In his impatience to apply Western customs to Russian society, he jettisoned Russian habits whose existence was based on common sense. It was true that the old Russian clothing was bulky and made walking difficult; limbs were certainly freer once the long robes and coats were cast off. But in the rigorous cold of Russian winter, the freer limbs were also more likely to be frostbitten. When the temperature sank to twenty or thirty below zero, the old Russian in his warm boots, his greatcoat rising above his ears and reaching down to the ground, with his bushy beard protecting his mouth and cheeks, could look with satisfaction at that poor Westernized fellow whose face was purple in the cold and whose knees, showing beneath his shortened coat, knocked together in a futile effort to keep warm.
Peter's ardent determination to rid himself quickly of all appurtenances and reminders of the old Muscovite customs and traditions had bleak results for his wife, Eudoxia. The autumn of his return from the West marked the final break between the twenty-six-year-old Tsar and the twenty-nine-year-old Tsaritsa.
Peter had long wished to end his marriage and to shed this sad and cloying woman whom he had never loved and whom he had been forced to marry. From the beginning, it had been no secret that Peter went out of his way to avoid his wife. She was simple and uneducated. She feared his enthusiasms and disliked his friends—particularly Lefort—and the foreigners who thronged into Peter's life. A good Orthodox woman who believed that foreigners were the source of heresy and contamination, she could not bear to see her husband adopting their clothes, their language, their habits and their ideas. Inevitably, by trying to come between her enthusiastic, headstrong husband the glittering life he had found with his new friends, Eudoxia only made her own position weaker. She also knew that Peter was unfaithful, that he kept Anna Mons in handsome style. Foolishly, she showed her jealousy openly, which angered Peter, while her own attempts to please him with letters or marks of affection merely wearied him. In short, he was bored with her, embarrassed by her and longed to be free of her.
While still in the West, dining, dancing and making conversation with the fascinating ladies he met everywhere, Peter resolved to be rid of his own helpless, uninteresting and possessive wife. He did not write a single line to Eudoxia during his eighteen months abroad, but his letters to his friends in Russia'contained broad
